nVidia 8600GT Code 10

Twiggers849

Hey Guys,

So my current graphics card is a Geforce 8600 GT 1GB RAM (or whatever you call it)

The other day I load up Sims 3 Pets, then the loading screen goes funny, and when it comes back it's all in 16-bit colours and there's pixels all over the screen. I exit the game, restart the computer and my display is now forced into a 800 x 600 resolution with 16 bit colours...

I can switch to my onboard graphics and my display works fine, but that's not a practical card for gaming of any sort.

Also, I've reinstalled drivers time and time again and in Device Manager my 8600 GT card just shows "Code 10"

I understand it could be a hardware conflict.
My motherboard's an ALiveNF6G-VSTA, and my cpu power unit is 600W so I believe that's capable for the 8600 GT card.

If anybody can help me then I will be very grateful!

Garnet_Alexandria

It sounds like the drivers crashed. Did you try entirely removing the drivers and then the video card itself and reseating it in it's slot?

Failing that, there's a chance it finally went bad. Many nVidia cards of the time, especially the GeForce 8400 and GeForce 8600 series, mostly in laptops but also discrete desktop cards, failed very prematurely. In short, they chip itself was soldered to the video card itself in a weak way, and after enough use (heat and cooling cycles wear on it), it goes frail and develops hairline cracks and faults. Laptops generally run warmer or have less cooling, so those are more prone to failure, but it wouldn't be unheard of for a desktop video card to give up either, especially if you were running without v-sync forced on in the nVidia control panel (as the card would be running free and would work harder).

One last alternative is try using the 275.33 drivers. It's seemingly mostly GeForce GTX 560 Ti (and maybe similar) GPUs having an issue with newer ones where they crash and recover (A TDR issue). I know mine does, but 275.33 works flawlessly. You might want to try those.